Human Factors' Contribution into Maritime Accidents by Applying the SHIELD HF Taxonomy

Despite the continuous improvement of safety measures, maritime accidents remain a concern in our society. Thus, as the literature has shown, over the last ten years, the frequency of groundings and collisions accidents in the maritime domain has increased. An official accident investigation is conducted for each serious maritime accident, however, the level of detail changes from accident to accident, hence, the details about human contributors and organisational issues are not systematically analysed and reported in a way that makes future extraction of trends and comparisons possible. With the aim to better capture human and organisational factors, this paper proposes to utilise the Safety Human Incident & Error Learning Database (SHIELD) HF Taxonomy, which was developed in the context of the European Union SAFEMODE project, in line with the key components of NASA-HFACS, HERA, and Reason’s Swiss Cheese Model. Therefore, in this study, ten collision and ten grounding maritime accidents reported by various maritime agencies are analysed via the SHIELD HF Taxonomy to identify the main accident contributors, including design deficiencies. The paper further proposes a framework for how these results can be utilised to develop the design and operational measures to prevent collision and grounding accidents. The paper demonstrates the benefits of using HF taxonomy for identifying the underlying causes as well as developing mitigating design solutions.